Harry Houdini

It has good icons and willpower, but I can't figure out what the ability would be useful for. It's thematic I guess: he can get out of sticky situations, but...so what?

As a sorcerer, he would pair well with Magnus Stiles, Nephren-Ka and Yog-Sothoth, All-in-One.

To leverage it, you'd probably need to be able to re-commit him somewhere else or otherwise make use of him being ready.  Overall, it's just not that great an ability though.

Are there any cards that let you commit a character after the normal commit window? It could work with Daring Buju to have a MU character to exhaust for the effect.

So I can imagine that Houdini would be useful for rushing multiple stories. If you have the characters and your opponent doesn't have enough to defend each one, you can go with it and pull Houdini out if your opponent decides to defend against him. Your opponent probably wouldn't do that though if it didn't cause casualties though. So I don't know.

Without any tricks otherwise, his ability is either a panic button if things go south before resolution begins, or a way for him to be on both offense and defense (activate the ability after the story resolves during the action window before characters are uncommitted). He's got a good statline, too.

I could see the usefulness of the ability if he's dragged to a story somehow, but that is extremely situational. 

His ability seems awfully specific which means you'd probably should take it into account whilst building your deck to. On the other hand it's not like it's inherently strong, there are cards that are "worthier" building your deck around I think.

He's certainly not bad, maybe I should just give him an unsupported whirl to see if his ability allows for some "gambling" plays - you usually don't throw your 3 cost characters at stories where you expect them to die without any effect, but you sometimes can't say for sure if your opponent can actually do something or just threatens to intervene with your plans. That aside: It would be helpful if his ability was a disrupt rather than an action. Would be fine thematically as well since hey, it's Houdini, he gets out just in time before it gets bad.

He's good to send in as a loner when the opponent doesn't have much visible defense. With investigation, he's got a shot at up to 3 tokens if unopposed, and he's got a way to escape Black Dog and similar grief.